Free Stormwalker by Allyson James

to control the instinctive panic that lodged in my throat. I hated death and places of death. Traditionally among my people, when someone died inside a hogan, the entire building was abandoned. Easier to build anew than to live with the ghosts. My father and grandmother had a horror of hospitals, because people went to die there. When my grandmother had gone in to have her gall bladder out ten years ago, we’d had a hell of a time convincing her to stay overnight. She still hadn’t forgiven me, or my father, for that.
    “Holy shit,” said a new voice. Fremont came across the basement floor, the beam of his flashlight bobbing. “That’s not Amy McGuire, is it?”
    He voiced what the three of us hadn’t dared. A woman, dead for months, walled up in a place that had been abandoned for years. Even if the hotel had been searched when Amy disappeared, no one had thought to remove the paneling down here until Maya had started working on the electricity.
    “It’s not her,” Nash snapped.
    The three of us jerked our attention to him. He stood with crowbar in hand, the glow of the flashlights making his uniform look gray. His face was just as gray.
    “You sure?” Fremont adjusted his cap. “She’s missing, and here’s a dead woman about her size.”
    Nash’s eyes glittered menacingly. I had the fleeting vision of him taking each of us out with the crowbar, walling us up behind the paneling to keep Amy company.
    “I want everyone out of here,” he said. “Upstairs, and don’t come back down. Maya, don’t go anywhere. I’ll need a statement from you. You too, Begay.”
    “It’s my hotel,” I said. “I’m not leaving.”
    “Good.” He gestured with the crowbar. “Out.”
    Maya gave him a look of undisguised fury before she nearly ran up the stairs, a string of muttered Spanish floating down after her. Fremont, the gentleman, politely waited for me to go ahead of him. I heard Nash click on his radio.
    I swung back. “Don’t call McGuire,” I said quickly. “Don’t let him see this.”
    I imagined what it would be like for my own father to view the remains of a woman who might be me, not knowing for sure whether the pile of bones and flesh was his daughter.
    “It’s not Amy,” Nash replied, words clipped.
    “Doesn’t matter. It could be her. Don’t make him have to identify her.”
    Nash regarded me for a long time. I don’t know what went on behind those eyes of his, but finally he nodded. “I’ll call Salas.”
    Salas was the assistant chief of police in Magellan. I didn’t know much about him, and I didn’t know whether he could keep this quiet, at least until the woman was identified. But if I could spare kindly Chief McGuire any agony, I would.
    “Go upstairs and stay there,” Nash repeated. “Tell your workers to stop what they’re doing. This is now a crime scene.”
    Terrific. I went up after Fremont. He moved to the carpenters to break the news to them, but Maya wasn’t in the lobby. I suppressed a growl of exasperation as I went to look for her. If she took off, Nash would probably blame me.
    I found Maya outside, standing in the shade of the building, arms folded, staring across the parking lot to the desert beyond. I leaned against the door frame, inhaling the clean morning air, trying to wash away the crawly sensation of death.
    I’d been here two weeks and not sensed or seen the woman’s ghost down there, nor had my protective spells signaled me that something was wrong. Why not? Maybe the spells knew that the dead woman wasn’t a danger? She wasn’t a demon or similar evil; she was a poor, sad person locked away in the dark, killed and abandoned.
    Lack of a ghost either meant that she was at peace, which didn’t tally with her being buried behind a wall, or it meant she hadn’t died here. I’d felt no residue of violence in the building, not even the emptiness of death.
    Fremont came outside and joined us in contemplation of the desert. “Do you think she was walled up